Christopher J. Phillips

The taste machine: Sense, subjectivity, and statistics in the California wine world

This article is about mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge. It focuses on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation. Using controlled experimental conditions, Amerine and colleagues transcribed judgments about taste into numbers that could then be aggregated and analyzed statistically. Through such techniques, they claimed to be able to turn subjectivities into objectivities, rendering private taste sensations into reliable and stable facts about objects in the world.

Fun and games

Blending fact and fiction, a mathematics professor aims to breathe new life into the history of game theory Game Changers, the English translation of Rudolph Taschners 2015 Die Mathematik Des Daseins, is loosely structured into a series of fictionalized vignettes about game playing that rely on invented conversations and dramatized interactions to tell the story of the early days of game theory.

Knowing By Number: Learning Math for Thinking Well

• The controversy of the Common Core State Standards for mathematics is just the latest in a long history of disagreements about the content and nature of mathematics education.

Facts versus fallacy

A statistics-driven treatise teaches readers how to spot lies, half-truths, and outright deception Since antiquity, mathematics had been an exemplar of certain knowledge. Reasoning like a mathematician meant reasoning reliably from assumptions to conclusions. Geometry, for example, was taught for centuries as a model for reasoning in general. Howard Wainers new book, Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist, suggests that geometrys role in the search for truth has been replaced by data science. Truth or Truthiness consists of a series of short, lively chapters that discuss how data scientists would approach various contemporary quandaries.